Threefold Cord in Action

Even if you know leftism is just a collection of Satanic brainwashing myths, it makes an impact when you see your beliefs proven right. This is normal when things God tells you are demonstrated right in front of you.

Leftism is rebellion against divine authority. That includes every form of leftism, including feminism.

Christians are supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and communicate with him throughout the day, submitting to him and listening to him. A man is supposed to be the anointed authority over his household, backed up by the authority of God. A wife is supposed to submit to both God and her husband.

A man and his wife are supposed to have different jobs. A man has the primary obligation to guide, provide, and protect. It’s a position of self-sacrifice. He provides a stable environment in which the wife and kids can thrive in safety. A woman is obligated to look after the house, and she is supposed to handle the bulk of childcare. The childen are supposed to submit to both parents as well as God. The dog submits to everyone. Satan and his fatherless imps are somewhere below the dog and the rats and roaches.

Before my wife got here, I had to do everything. Manage the business. Bring in the money. Look after bills and taxes. Look after the buildings and grounds. Shop. Cook. Clean. I had to buy a back scratcher.

Leftists hate it when you say this, but it’s true: men are not that great at homemaking. Our standards are completely different. Even if we are clean and orderly, the homes of unaccompanied men lack the peaceful, warm atmosphere of homes ordered by women.

I was reasonably clean, but I had a plastic folding table from Home Depot in my kitchen. I had plastic chairs around it. I had an ammunition press and a large cache of cartridges in the dining room, along with two benches and a lot of tools.

The garage was chaotic. I sprayed it with pesticide, I kept the garbage from backing up, and once in a while, I opened the doors and ran the leaf blower. That was good enough for me.

There was a lot of junk on the kitchen table, because I ate in the living room. Left to their own devices, men will eat in three places: the couch, the patio, and standing over the kitchen sink.

Walking in my master closet was very difficult because I had left a lot of guns and other junk in there.

I was tired of cooking, not because cooking was a lot of work, but because I also had to clean and shop. Sometimes I made good food, but often, I made things that were simple, that I could choke down in order to prolong survival. It saved me work.

I had $20 white sheets from IKEA. I got hooked on them while caring for my dad. Cheap and easy to bleach. On top of the sheets, I used either a quilt I found among my sister’s abandoned belongings when she moved to rehab, or a cheap Chinese electric blanket.

Things were good. Men are not like women, so I was okay with my standards. Things are better now, however.

My wife nearly freaked out when she got here, saying she could not be happy unless things were in order.

All junk was removed from the master suite. We went through things I had been ignoring, and we threw out stuff I should have dumped long ago. I was relieved to have the motivation and help. We laundered the pillows. We made several shopping trips for real bedding.

My wife emptied and cleaned my dresser and end tables, and she put things back in, in ways that made somewhat more sense. She vacuumed. She dusted. She organized the closet. There is so much room in there now, you could have home church in the closet. She goes in there to pray for long periods.

We emptied the kitchen cupboards and pantry. My wife cleaned, we threw stuff out, and things went back in. We got a rack that hangs on the pantry door, and we filled it with things like condiments and cookies. We like it so much, we have a second one on the way for the other door. The pantry seems three times as big now.

My friend Mike stayed here last year, and he left a household’s worth of junk and food-related things. We threw out a lot of expired Mike items.

She organized my laundry room, where I keep my paranoia shelves full of nonperishable food. They seemed full when she arrived. Now they seem empty. Simply moving stuff around made a big difference.

She attacked the garage. Mike had left a huge box of seasonings, oil, condiments, and other food items in there. Unbeknownst to me, he had left a box of starch and a box of confectioner’s sugar open, which explained why I had a roach problem in a garage where the garbage was always sealed up and dumped regularly. The box containing all the food items was full of roach poop and irate live roaches. I had to blast it with Raid and leave it alone for hours before I could put it in the car to take it to the dump. Roaches will colonize a car if you let them.

I sent Mike photos, and he said he wanted to save some things. Mike is a man, too. Everything went to the landfill.

Mike had left a couple of hundred pounds of random items in the room where I keep the piano. My wife moved it all into a smallish space in the garage.

I sold Mike my Moto Guzzi motorcycle a long time ago, in order to get it out of the garage. This plan backfired, because he left it where it was. Inspired by my wife, I put it outside under a tarp. We now have so much room, we can bring the pickup inside.

Mike keeps saying he’s going to fly down and haul his things off. I don’t know how long I can protect them from my wife.

My bathrooms were pretty clean, but now the cabinets are ordered. I redid the sink P traps, so now we are safe from leaks. My wife bought post-poop spray for use after people drop a deuce.

We plan meals together. We shop together. Generally, I cook. When I cook, I get to go sit down afterward. My wife cleans up the kitchen. That’s totally new. I can’t get used to it.

While I sit and she cleans, I can almost hear shrill, high-pitched voices with New York accents, telling me women aren’t supposed to do that.

Yesterday, she cooked a neat African meal. It was the first time she cooked an entire meal here. It was really good. I didn’t know she could cook. I got up to do the dishes afterward, and she sent me to the living room and cleaned the kitchen herself.

When I work on things like the tractors and the grounds, I don’t have to think about things I’ll have to do in the house later. I don’t concern myself with vacuuming or cleaning toilets. It’s all done for me.

I’m having problems with my old gate opener, so I have to keep opening it up and working on it. I have a kitchen cart I’m building, and there is still some welding and painting to do. While I work on things like that, my wife is in the house, imposing order.

I haven’t done a load of laundry in weeks. Clean clothing magically appears in the dresser. If I spill something on my shirt, my wife insists I give it to her and go get a fresh one.

I showed my wife how I clean toilets when she got here. Since then, I haven’t cleaned a single one. They’re always shiny and fresh-smelling, like only the angels used them. I’m not positive, but I think she keeps leaving the seats up. I’m afraid to ask. What kind of woman does that in feminist-ruined America?

We got on the living room. We looked at a zillion couches and chairs. We bought a really nice vintage rocker at a consignment store, which we visit frequently. I learned about Howard Restor-A-Finish, a product that works wonders on used furniture. I picked out a traditional wool rug like the ones my grandparents had, and we’ll get one after the turn of the year.

I’ve been on Ebay, buying traditional kitchen stuff. I got some old copper Jell-O molds for the walls. I bought some Griswold cast iron trivets to replace my mother’s trivets, which were looted and lost. I may pick up a few more century-old cast iron items.

We bought a bunch of picture frames, and we are putting family photos on the walls and coffee table. We have dedicated a hallway wall to future photos of friends and relations.

When my grandparents died, my relations took things that were ostentatious or valuable. I got my grandmother’s kerosene lamps. They’re worth around $30 each, but I remember seeing them on the mantel in her basement. We took them out and cleaned them up, and now they’re on our mantel, along with a couple of clay whiskey jugs I inherited. I’m considering putting an old butter churn on the hearth.

We go to the flea market and look for other vintage junk. Not something a man does when he lives alone, unless he has hopes of attracting another man.

I bought some vintage postcards of scenes I remember from Kentucky. I got a frame for them, and we’ll put it on a wall somewhere. I have a 1950 stamped postcard from the post office at the kibbutz where I worked. It commemorates the opening of the post office. We’ll frame that, too.

Furniture stores have sales in January and February. We plan to take advantage. We couldn’t find an old bedroom set we liked, so we chose one, and we will buy it next year.

Men create quarters. Women create homes. I would never have done any of these things had I not gotten married.

The difference is tremendous. The house seems bigger. It’s more peaceful. It’s a good place for prayer. I’m much more on top of business obligations, because now I have more time as well as a person who depends on me.

My wife doesn’t have to think about food, clothing, housing, protection, car problems, anything related to tools, or medical care. I don’t have to occupy myself with wife duties. It’s tremendous. It’s traditional. It’s correct. It works.

Of course it works. It was God’s idea.

Meanwhile, the US is full of 35+ career women–feminists–who live with cats, worry about their eggs, and put out because they think it’s the way to find husbands. They learned this from feminist leaders…who didn’t marry.

They’re miserable. They have no one to look after them. They have no one to look after. They have to compete with girls who are younger and therefore much more attractive. They think about buying ideal semen from tall, high-IQ, handsome strangers they will never meet and who are probably mostly transients and fast food workers. Women who bought the lie try to buy sperm from the kind of men who won’t marry them. They know most of their kind will die single.

Single men are better off than single women. Harsh fact of life. My life was very good before I met my wife. She was poor. She lived in a hovel with two other women. She had no reason to think kids were on the way any time soon, and she had no way to provide for them. I was sitting in a big house on a farm, enjoying my hobbies and my relationship with God, lacking for nothing except someone to pray with and make sacrifices for.

Our relationship is unusual in that she was in another country, but American single women are also worse off than single men. They are not as capable of looking after themselves as men. No one ever says, “It must be tough, being a man, living alone.”

They crave kids most men don’t crave. They have biological clocks, but it’s possible for a 100-year-old man to have kids.

My great-grandfather had 11 kids by his second wife, my great-grandmother. She was 15 when he married her, and he was already old. He and her father arranged his second marriage without consulting her. He married her on her 15th birthday, and they were married when he died at the age of 78.

He was about 55 when my grandfather was born. He ended up with 21 children. He was about 70 when his last child was born. Women can’t do that.

My great-grandmother was probably saved from additional children by menopause, not any deterioration on her husband’s part. Meanwhile, American women in their twenties are freezing eggs.

We pray together at least twice every day. We share testimony and revelation. We discuss the Bible. We help motivate each other.

This is a good system, but because I was raised in Satan’s world of sick relationships, somehow there is a part of me that feels I have to defend it. Like the part of me that used to feel like I was walking into porn theaters when I walked into gun ranges.

God’s system is right. It works. It’s for everyone.

I feel as though I am working harder than expected to make this home feel homey, and I think this is because the world is washed up. It’s a hard, cold place now, full of perversion and outright insanity. A traditional home is insulation from, and a counterbalance to, the filth of the persecuting, trans-worshiping, phone-addicted world, and it’s a reminder that we will eventually live in a world filled with God’s light and warmth.

I’m writing this not long after Jill Biden put out a stomach-twisting video of the left’s vision of a proper Christmas. You must have seen it by now. Christmas is supposed to be a sort of second Thanksgiving, in which we celebrate the gifts of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. It’s about the love of families. We celebrate these things in our homes, where we try to rekindle our warmth and love for each other. A home is never so much a home as it is on Christmas.

Ms. Biden’s video is a sickening parade of sexual oddities in bizarre costumes, with fake grins of the sort you would expect to see on kids high on molly, prancing among creepy decorations as though recreating the kind of thing an unsaved person might see while descending into hell after a Christmas Day overdose.

It’s terrible when the left tries to destroy Christmas, but it’s even more nauseating when they try to take it over. The Biden video has nothing in it to remind us of Yeshua. It’s full of dancers who are about as charming as horror movie clowns. Their insincere grins are supposed to be cheery, but they come off as threatening, like the grins of demons awaiting the arrival of the dead.

It reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for years: the distaste homosexuals feel for Christmas.

Young people may not remember it, but we used to hear a lot about the misery homosexuals endured over Christmas. Other people were celebrating with their husbands, wives, kids, and other relations. Homosexuals had nobody and no relationship with the God they knew detested their behavior. Christmas was a yearly reminder that a lifestyle of alcohol, drugs, selfishness, sex with feces-smeared anuses instead of vaginas, and too many sexual partners to remember was vastly inferior to normal heterosexual life.

I don’t know if it’s true, because self-pitying mythology was common, but they used to say many homosexuals committed suicide over Christmas, recognizing the emptiness of depravity and not knowing any way to be delivered.

The church has done an extremely poor job of delivering people from sexual perversion and compulsive fornication, but to be fair, not many people are interested in deliverance.

There is no way homosexual families will ever be “right.” It’s a hopeless quest, like putting a wig on Bruce Jenner, giving him a girl’s name, slicing his penis off, and expecting normal men to ask him out. It’s terrible when people give up everything to chase toxic mirages.

Jenner has actually complained that men don’t want him. It is astonishing that he didn’t expect that. You can put icing and candles on a cow pie and tell people it’s a birthday cake, but no one in his right mind will want to eat it.

There is a HUGE difference between a woman and a castrated man full of wrong hormones. Huge. Ask any man. The flesh feels different. The mannerisms are feminine, not effeminate. The mind is different. The skin has a different scent. Women don’t make noise when they walk. And women don’t have big man hands built for swinging swords and axes.

I think Biden’s video is motivated in hostility toward the “haves,” like all of leftism. Other people have decorations with crosses. They read the Bible to their kids. They look at manger displays. They hold hands and thank Yeshua, knowing he has prepared a perfect future for them. Leftists are out in the cold, so they try to make Christmas about nonexistent elves, a maladjusted fat man obsessed with other people’s kids, reindeer, trees, drunkenness, fornication, and gifts bought on credit, which assure a miserable New Year full of bills and interest.

I see Biden’s video as an act of aggression. It’s an effort to replace Yeshua and Christians with sexually ambiguous weirdos in costumes straight out of a child’s nightmares. Maybe it’s a deliberate effort to mock Christmas and Christianity. “It’s our White House now, and THIS is your White House Christmas.”

And the choreography and music are horrible.

All in all, I think a Christmas tree lighting ceremony ruined by perverts and angry Muslims is easier to watch.

How could “Dr. Jill” look at this video and not realize it was a belly-churning abomination?

“Dr. Jill.” The doctor of education. Like Bill Cosby.

I’m a doctor, too. I’m a doctor of law, like every lawyer under a certain age. I don’t go around making people call me “Dr. Steve.” Ridiculous. If you want people to call you a doctor, get a real doctorate. Become a physician or a mathematician. Learning how to teach kids to clap erasers isn’t the same as mastering neurosurgery or real analysis.

Shaquille O’Neal has a doctorate, and he insists the world is flat. He says he has seen it through airplane windows.

Dr. Shaq.

Great guy. An inspiration in many ways. Not a real doctor.

We need to stop questioning God’s guidelines. The person who created them is God, after all. He knows what works. His ways work. There are millions of normal families all over the world who do things God’s way, and they get results. They’re not buying sperm and cutting themselves.

I am extremely grateful for the change in my life. I wanted this even when I was a kid. I wanted it even after hormones kicked in, and other boys were only thinking about nailing up as many pelts as possible. I knew it was right, even though I was a terrible Christian.

I pity the people who won’t listen. It doesn’t matter how hard and long you suck on a poisoned pacifier. You will never get any milk.

Deserve’s Got Nothing to do With it

I am now 8 days into my experience as a passport bro whose wife has finally made it to the States.

“Passport bro” has a very loose definition. Fundamentally, it means any American man who passed up American women and married a foreigner, for any reason or combination of reasons. It’s a pejorative term, like “cradle-robber” (also me) and “gold digger.”

If you really want to make American women who don’t know anything about you furious, marry a woman who is younger or foreign. Many American women won’t care at all. The rest will hate you and your wife, as though you were personally responsible for the unfulfilled, much-deserved lives they and their awful friends, sisters, and mothers live.

Total strangers have said my wife was too young and pretty for me. WHOO HOO! I certainly hope so.

One lady who disapproves of us had a great husband she abused and abandoned, and she ended up bitter and alone. As an elderly, lonely leftist who will die single, she still feels qualified to offer marriage advice.

Come to think of it, a lot of female celebrities who tell young women what decisions to make are alone, miserable, whorish, addicted to drugs, and in some cases, mentally ill. “Don’t get married.” “Have kids out of wedlock.” “Make your sons wear dresses.” “Name your kids things like ‘Bronx’ and ‘Maddox.'”

Why do so many people take advice from individuals whose lives are dumpster fires?

Here’s something interesting: men don’t care at all about women marrying outside their countries. We don’t care about elderly women marrying younger, better-looking men, either, not that it happens much outside of Hollywood. We don’t care. We don’t think about it. Why the difference?

Women, on the other hand, get angry when they hear younger, prettier women they don’t know married old men they also don’t know and may not even want.

If any crabby single women I could never have married are reading, it was never a choice between you and someone prettier and younger. The choice was 1. someone I wanted or 2. being alone. If I were willing to marry someone who repelled me in order to avoid being alone, I’d have grandchildren by now.

A Jamaican girl I knew told me about rent-a-dreads. These are gigolos who roam the beaches of Jamaica. Single white women fly to Jamaica to find them, and they pay them for sex. I thought the story was funny, but I didn’t call the women predators or perverts, which is what many rejected women call passport bros.

I didn’t resent Jamaican man-whores for snapping up all the miserable middle-aged white women I didn’t want. Men generally don’t think that way. Black American men tend to be possessive of black women as a whole, but the rest of us are different.

Women are extremely hostile toward each other. That’s the problem. They are incredibly competitive for men and everything else. They have a zero-sum attitude. “What helps you hurts me.” This is why they can’t stand each other. It’s one of the weirdest aspects of human nature.

I’ve noticed that many women get upset when other women do well in any area of life. Women use this trait to torment each other.

I know a single woman who got upset when I mentioned Valentine’s Day and also when I spoke of a male friend who had a new romance. She let me know I was not to speak of these things. That was wild. If she had developed a wonderful relationship and gotten married, my friend and I would have been very happy about it.

Another person’s success isn’t your failure. If another person’s prayers are answered, yours may be answered, too.

I have an aunt who used to give my single sister endless, glowing updates on her grandchildren, all of whom are prodigies and superheroes, much like her son, who had to settle for one of the world’s worst law schools and went on to do mindless work as a low-level prosecutor who refers methheads to rehab all day. My understanding is that he is so lazy, he refused to do anything about the leaking roof on the house she gave him, so she had to have it replaced. Supposedly, she is willing the house to his kids instead of him because she thinks he won’t take care of it. He’s not the guy she held him out to be.

I never thought much about my aunt’s stories, but my sister told me she was telling them because she wanted to make the rest of us miserable. Women understand women. In my sister’s case, it seems to have worked.

When my aunt used to tell me whoppers about her grandchildren, all I thought was, “Wow, this is boring.”

Well, that’s not all I thought. I also thought, “How can she not know I don’t believe this stuff?”

Everyone in her family was the light of the world. Her son was a philosopher and the new Leibniz (a name he would have to look up). Her daughter was going to be Miss Kentucky. Her son-in-law could pick musical instruments up and play them without lessons. Her grandsons had x-ray vision, at least one could fly, and their fingerpainting had attracted the attention of the National Gallery and Livermore labs.

If I had to guess, these kids aren’t extremely bright. They’re probably smart; somewhere in the pleasant intelligence band most lawyers come from. I don’t know them, but I am qualified to guess because I know my aunt.

She told me her son had been admitted by the University of Michigan Law School (top 10), and then I found out it was WESTERN Michigan, AKA the Cooley Law School, generally held to be the single worst law school in the US. No exaggeration. It’s famous. Instead of the top 10, he was admitted to #199 out of 199.

If you can fog a mirror, you’re in. Michael Cohen is a Cooley grad.

If there had ever been any evidence these kids were brilliant or even just Mensa material, I would have heard about it. Early and often. She worked very hard to turn dubious anecdotes into proof of transcendent genius, so if an actual test score had popped up, it would be on a billboard.

She bragged about her daughter’s second husband, the anaesthesiologist. Turns out he’s really a NURSE. She took a respected profession that looks very good to most people and made it look like an utter failure the family was trying to hide. Thanks to my aunt, I never think of him as a accomplished nurse anaesthetist, which is how I would see him had she told the truth. I think of him as a guy who couldn’t get into medical school.

For years, I thought he was a doctor. My aunt used that word.

He’s probably a fantastic person, but his unpaid publicist is not doing him any favors.

She told me her daughter and the doctor lived in a historic mansion among millionaires. One day I was thinking about all the BS I had heard, so I got curious and looked them up. They have a very nice but ordinary house worth considerably less than a million. No NBA star will ever want it; I’ll put it that way. It would seem like a wonderful house to me, except I was expecting Mar-a-Lago.

Her second husband’s granddaughter managed to make it to the first round of one of those talent-search shows several years ago. My aunt got to sit in the audience, so her sans-microphone face was on TV for less than the length of a bull ride. She got to meet Jim Stafford or Shabba Doo or whoever it was that hosted the show. I, a person who hadn’t watched network TV regularly in maybe 15 years, got to hear about that. You would think the entire family had performed a Super Bowl halftime show. My best guess: the girl went back to singing in small bars, like 99% of professional pop musicians.

Let’s see. Just now, I managed to remember enough of her name to find her on Google. Her Instagram fan page has 45 followers. I think you get that many spam followers just for signing up. Last update: two years before coronavirus. So she quit. Well, that’s smart. A lot of stubborn people of modest gifts spend their autumn years playing in roadhouses. Maybe she went to college. And studied nursing. Another doctor in the making.

To get back on topic, men like women. Women like men. Men like men. Women can’t get along with women. This is why lesbians have the shortest, rockiest relationships of any group. It must be hard being a lesbian, because women want long relationships and security more than men, and lesbians fight like crazy and break up over and over.

I guess when there are two people in a relationship, and both give the cold shoulder at once, which is what many women do, it turns into a death spiral. A man will go to an angry woman and try to start a conversation. A woman will sulk behind a locked door until the sun dies.

I had an eccentric history teacher named Morgan Kelly, and he lied all the time, but he told us one thing that was true. He said the Chinese character for “woman” could mean different things. Used once, it meant “woman.” Used twice, it meant “quarrel.” Too funny. The web says modern Chinese people have stopped using the quarrel symbol, which shows the truth hit home in some quarters.

Many women lose their minds when men they used to be involved with date or get married, or even when they just go on with life and enjoy it.

I am enjoying life. I’m not doing it to torment anyone, though.

I say that as a joke, but it wouldn’t be funny if there weren’t some ugly truths behind it. There are people who live to brag, not to make themselves feel good, but to depress and humiliate others. If Americans were anything like the people they pretend to be on Facebook, we could legitimately be said to be the master race.

Now that I think about it, I guess I have hurt some people very badly with my few small successes in life. When something good happens to me, I never think, “This will really break so-and-so’s heart!” But some hearts must have been broken. It wouldn’t necessarily take much. It used to break my middle-aged sister’s heart when I rode in the front seat of the car instead of the back. Made her furious.

Envy is pretty bad. It’s Satan’s sin. “I will be like the most high.” He hates God for being above him. He hates us for being born later, being smaller, weaker, less beautiful, and less intelligent, and being promoted above him while he waits to roast and squeal in the lake of fire. People who are envious wish others ill and try to harm them when those they envy are blameless. Envy is the heart of leftism.

Life as a passport bro is good so far. It’s not like there are any big surprises. Before my wife arrived, we had spent around 6 weeks together abroad, and we had a practice of doing video chat twice a day.

If there is anything disappointing about our new arrangement, it’s that it feels like we have been living here together for decades. You would think we would both be ecstatic because we were finally together in our house, but it was more like a couple who had been married for 20 years came home after separate vacations.

Some changes are requiring mental adjustments. I can’t do everything I used to do. For example, I have been informed I get out of the car too fast. My routine is park, neutral, shut down, open door, jump out. I would guess this takes under two seconds. Now it’s neutral, shut down, stare at wife until makeup is done.

I am also not permitted to wear T-shirts with holes in them. I did not see that coming. And I have to keep an eye on the trash to see which treasured items the wife has thrown out. She threw out the boxes for some cameras and accessories, and I had to rescue them. She threw out my saddle soap!

I’m becoming my grandfather. My grandmother took some of his clothes and put them on a scarecrow, and he drove to the field and took them back down.

My wife threw out some jeans that had bleach spots on them. Who does that?

My beloved queen-sized mattress is on the way out. It’s from Costco. It’s perfect for me. It’s a joy. Back in my fornication days, I never had problems sharing a queen-sized mattress. Now, I am told it’s way too small. Yeah; trying staying on your side. How about that? That’s what I’ll tell her. One of these days.

I fixed a beautiful stuffed turkey on Thursday, and she refused to eat the stuffing. Some kind of mental block I don’t comprehend. I had not been aware that stuffing phobias existed.

You would think affluent people would be more likely to have food phobias because they would be sheltered, but it seems the opposite is true. I’ve noticed that people who grew up poor are more likely to have hangups about food. I dated a girl who could not eat anything resembling a sausage, and she also refused to go near Chinese food.

My master bath was very clean before my wife got here, except the shower needed a good application of scum remover in some areas. She’s in there now anyway, sterilizing the whole room.

On the up side, I don’t do dishes or laundry any more. PASSPORT BRO FOR LIFE!

Also, she is willing to get a recliner couch. That’s every man’s dream. I think they’re a little tacky, but when you sit on one, you forget about all that. I don’t think I would be able to make myself buy one if I lived here alone, because I would think, “God gave you this nice house, and you put a recliner couch in the living room.” But if she’s for it, I think I can forgive myself.

We went to three furniture stores yesterday, primarily to look for a kitchen table that isn’t available at Home Depot. I would guess we saw 200 recliners. I was shocked. I have a couple of recliners already. I got my dad a cheap Chinese lift recliner when he was dealing with dementia, and I got a big Barcalounger for the upstairs rec room. I looked around my area before going online, but all I saw was a disappointing La-Z-Boy store. I didn’t check the regular furniture stores. That’s when I found out how popular recliners are here.

We laugh all the time. We are getting a lot of prayer in. She gets along with Marvin. Things are going to be okay. The rest of my life may be very trying for envious people.

Blessed

My wife and I are waiting for our first Thanksgiving turkey to come out of the oven.

I bone and stuff my turkeys. These days, the nannies of the world frown on stuffing the way they started frowning on non-neutered dogs in about 1980. For centuries, people stuffed birds and baked them, and all was good. Then we started hearing about salmonella and so on.

There are sites that say stuffed turkey is unsafe. Not really true, but making things worse, some also say stuffed turkey doesn’t taste as good. They say stuffing has to reach 165° in order to be safe, and they claim that by the time the stuffing is that hot, the turkey is dry.

Ridiculous.

I’m not sure why so many Thanksgiving turkeys come out dry, but my informed guess is that it’s because most people can’t cook.

When I shop for turkeys, I buy whatever the store has. Frozen, fresh, cheap, expensive, organic, chemically-enhanced…whatever. It doesn’t matter. They always come out perfect, so why look for a particular product?

If your turkey is dry, you probably cooked it at too high a temperature. It’s no wonder people do this. The Internet is full of sites mentioning figures like 350° and 425°. I would expect problems, too, if I were crazy enough to cook birds at temperatures like that.

I cook turkeys at 200° to 250°, depending on how I feel. Low and slow cooking doesn’t dry out the meat, and it makes it more tender. I take the bones out, season the meat, sew the bird up so it can hold stuffing, cram the stuffing in, sew it up, season the outside, plop it in a pan on a rack, cover it with foil, and put it in the oven.

When the stuffing gets up around 155°, I remove the foil and turn the heat up to brown the skin.

It works. It’s not brain surgery. Although it kind of is turkey surgery.

I use dental floss and an upholstery needle to do the sewing.

I’m no microbiologist, but I’m pretty sure a turkey’s important bacteria will die at 165° regardless of how long it took the turkey to get that hot. Maybe slow cooking encourages them to breed more energetically during roasting, but if they all die at 165°, what difference does it make?

I slow-cook all sorts of stuff. Barbecue that isn’t slow-cooked is disgusting. It’s like rubber. Barbecue was invented to make cheap, tough meat soft and tasty. The FDA lets restaurants do it. If it’s safe to eat a pork butt that took 12 hours to cook at 225°, it seems to me I should be able to eat a turkey that cooks for 4 hours at about the same temperature.

Anyway, no one has died so far, and a good stuffed turkey is worth a certain amount of gastrointestinal distress. And you have to die of something. Sooner or later.

Listen. They have antibiotics now.

Suddenly things that didn’t cause problems are considered dangerous. Shut up and let me eat my paint chips in peace.

I made pecan pie and sweet potato pie, as I wrote yesterday. I think next time I may add some pumpkin to the sweet potato pie, to get the best of both worlds. I hope I did okay.

I made green beans with homemade salt pork. I cured it and smoked it myself. I simmered the beans nearly to death and then put them in the fridge. They’re always better the next day.

I made cranberry relish. I used to think I used pretty much the same recipe as everyone else, but Googling suggests I do not. I chop the berries up with oranges and pecans, and then I pour in cherry Jell-O and sugar. I also add Grand Marnier. I don’t cook the berries.

It has worked well so far, but I think it’s pretty hard to mess up cranberry relish.

I still have to make mashed potatoes and yams. After that, I am done.

We will be drinking Korbel brut. When I was in college, I considered this my cheap champagne for nights when I was not feeling picky, but it seems like it’s way better now, so I don’t see much point in buying French. I like it better than Cordon Rouge for sure.

The only concern now is whether my wife likes American Thanksgiving food. Even if I make it well, there is no guarantee it will suit her.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Thanksgiving, and that they have as much to thank God for as I have.

Finally, Thanksgiving at Home

We are getting ready for our second Thanksgiving together. Last year, we ate at Lawry’s in Singapore, and it was expensive and not very good. Is this because Singaporeans can’t cook American food, or is it because Lawry’s is a bad chain? I don’t know, but I am suspicious of Lawry’s. They serve steamed peas as a side dish, which makes you wonder if they have read a competing menu since 1938.

They served lumpy creme brulee. It’s not a hard dish to make correctly.

I made a pecan pie, and I have a sweet potato pie in the oven. Why not pumpkin pie, like my mother and grandmother? The simple fact is that pumpkin pie is not as good. It’s exactly the same thing, made with a vegetable that isn’t as tasty.

I don’t really understand why pumpkin pie exists. Think of all the better pies. Apple. Key lime. Cherry. Peach. Blueberry. Coconut cream. Cheesecake is a type of pie. It’s a pie people eat out of a sense of obligation. No one orders pumpkin pie in October.

I would guess that most people who have never had sweet potato pie would think it was pumpkin pie upon trying it. They would think somebody had finally made a good pumpkin pie.

I don’t have my own sweet potato pie recipe, so I found the Libby’s pumpkin pie recipe, substituted yams 1:1, I added a couple of things. I put in a tiny bit of nutmeg, some vanilla, and a tablespoon of butter. Butter should be in everything.

Is it wrong to drink the leftover batter? I’m not saying I would do that. But would it be wrong?

Definitely not saying I just did it.

I use the pecan recipe from the Karo bottle, but I add bourbon. Makes a big difference.

I should make my own pie crusts, but I don’t. Not for obligatory pies.

I think the recipe is too hot. It calls for 375°. At this temperature, your crust will burn. When I saw my crust getting dark, I threw a sheet of foil over it. It stuck in one place, but the pie is okay.

Next time, I plan to watch the pie to see how it’s doing, and I’ll drop the temperature to 300° when the crust starts to scare me. There are really only two things you have to do when you make pies of the custard family: brown the crust and firm up the batter. You can firm up the batter at 200° if it makes you happy. There is nothing magical about 375°. You can make fantastic creme brulee at 205° with no water bath. I think bakers use water baths because they’re in a hurry.

Later, I will be fixing green beans with salt pork. They always taste better the second day. I’ll also put some cranberry relish and cornbread dressing together.

Tomorrow, I have to get up and bone the turkey. Then I’ll cram it full of dressing, throw it in the oven, and hope for the best.

I’ll be using a lot of dry white wine in the food. What a difference it makes. But when I suggest it to people, they wrinkle their noses. People want exactly what their mothers made, no matter how bad it is. My friend Mike eats canned cranberry sauce. Sometimes I miss my mom’s spaghetti, which had chili powder in it.

Thanksgiving will seem strange. For the first time, I’ll be celebrating in an environment containing only Spirit-led Christians who can appreciate the purpose of the holiday.

I don’t know if my wife will get the full benefit of the experience, because she has never had traditional American Thanksgiving food. For all I know, she won’t like any of it. But we’ll be together, thanking God, and we won’t be eating restaurant food that is, objectively, substandard.

She is tearing the house up. The sudden cleanliness and order are intimidating.

It will take time to get used to having someone do things for me, without being resentful or keeping score on me. It feels odd, especially in a world of man-hating feminists who are miserable because they bought into one of history’s great lies. I’m no feminist, but I have nagging feelings: “Shouldn’t I clean that up? Is it really okay to just sit here?” I dismiss them.

My wife didn’t have thoughts like that while I was fixing the sinks. Feminism is a one-edged sword. Men are brainwashed to do what wives used to do, but women are not expected to fix sinks, kill spiders, open their own jars, or shoot burglars.

I have never seen a marriage that was in proper order. I’ve seen whiny, unsatisfied women. I’ve seen self-centered men who were like middle-aged frat boys. I’ve seen Christians repeat Satanic marriage doctrine, speaking of men as though we were somehow defective and in need of a redesign. I’ve seen women who pretended to be glad they were able to live their dreams, working in fungible, modestly-paid positions in Dilbertian cubicles with their forgotten liberal arts degrees. I never saw one who turned out to be Amelia Earhart or Wonder Woman, the way feminists say they will.

“Thank you, Betty Friedan, because I get to sit in a cubicle, living out scenes from Office Space every day! Thank God an unvetted Mexican with a 6th-grade education is raising my kids while I shuffle folders and look for ways to torpedo all the other women at my job! Thank God I aborted the burdensome children I conceived while trying unsuccessfully to convince men to marry me. I’m so glad I will never see them grow up!” No woman who is honest has ever felt like saying that.

I’ve known all sorts of women who saw 30 coming and realized they had blown it. You can see a lot of women like that on Youtube. Search for videos about women “hitting the wall.” They enter the workplace at 22 or 25, and before they get beyond entry-level, they’re 30, and their fertility is tanking precipitously. And they are competing with women the better part of a decade younger.

Men like youth. It’s the best cosmetic. There is no substitute. And the way women put out these days, men don’t have much incentive to marry their old girlfriends. They milk the cow until the wall looms up, and then they bail out and trade up.

Since leaving college, I have probably Googled girls I knew fewer than 5 times, and I don’t mean women I wished I had dated or married, because there weren’t any like that. I just wondered if such women could possibly be married. I found them easy to find. Generally, they still had their maiden names.

I went to Columbia University, where 2020 arrived in about 1975. The women were horrible. Perpetually enraged. Landmines that blew up and spewed sexist hate when men got too close. Now I can Google them and find out how they have done, alone, with no kids, in jobs where their legacies mean about as much as the legacy I leave when I check out of a Hampton Inn.

Sometimes I wonder if any college girl* from the Northeast has ever married (a man**) and had children***.

We have a shot at a normal marriage.

No human being can make a marriage work, so I am doing what I can to turn everything over to God. There is no possibility either of us could make it work on our own.

* XX or “actual” woman
** XY or “actual” man
*** not cats

Plus the End of Candace Owens

In case anyone is wondering how my life is going now that my wife is a resident of the United States, I am here to let you know. Exactly what you would expect is happening. She is in the process of throwing out everything I hold dear.

Slight exaggeration.

Today, she pulled all the drawers out of my awful dresser, and she has been using a HEPA-filter vacuum to suck the dust out of the dresser itself. The contents of the dresser are all over the room. Hope there was nothing incriminating in there.

We went to a ritzy restaurant as soon as we got away from the airport. Of course, I am referring to White Castle. I thought she might be too tired after around 40 hours of traveling, but she insisted. Sadly, it turned out she didn’t like it as much Shake Shack, so we failed to knock off our bag of 10 cheese sliders.

I did my part.

A friend of mine needed a place to stop on a trip to Miami with his kids. His grandmother raised him, and he was on the way to her funeral. They met my wife on the way back. I made pizza both times.

The kids cleaned up my downstairs. I have no idea why they enjoy doing that, but I don’t exactly discourage it.

My wife is finally caught up on sleep, and this is why she is going over the house. I am trying to look involved. I changed the P-traps under two sinks. They were leaking. The character who installed them used something that looked like a combination of plumber’s putty and pipe dope. Here’s what you’re supposed to apply: nothing. I put a little Teflon grease on the threads, though.

I believe he used a pipe wrench to tighten the joints. They’re supposed to be hand-tight. They were torn up, and I had to exert myself to get them off.

I also took one of the horrible Chinese casters off Marvin’s cage and checked the threads. I have 4 much-better casters on the way. If we’re going to fix up the house, we have to fix Marv’s house as well.

We have Thanksgiving supplies laid in, and I am making cornbread for dressing. I’m making a lot of bacon because I need 3/4 of a cup of grease.

She has been tearing strips of bacon in tiny bits and eating them one at a time. Why do women do that? I told her she knew she was going to eat the whole strip, so she should quit fooling herself. She said, “You’re so vicious.” Then she ate more.

Our plan is to fix the bedroom, living room, and kitchen before anything else. My adored queen size mattress may be exiled to a guest room.

We’ll have to hit Orlando soon, because that’s where the real stores are. I hope the spending tsunami starts to abate by New Year’s.

I have been reading the news. It looks like Candace Owens has decided to murder her own career. Is it admirable, because she’s saying what she thinks is true, regardless of the cost, or is it just ridiculous, because she hasn’t spent two minutes verifying the things she says before buying herself a one-way ticket back to nowhere?

She seems to think Israel is an apartheid state, and she made an ambiguous remark about genocide which seemed to be intended to justify criticisms of Israel.

She said something nutty. She said Jerusalem’s Arab Quarter was the place where Arabs were “allowed to live.” Really insane. As a whole lot of other commentators have remarked since she made her claim, Arabs can live wherever they want in Israel. They hold Knesset seats They serve in the IDF.

The Arab Quarter is pretty small. It holds a small percentage of Israel’s Arabs. This is not classified information. How could an otherwise-bright woman fail to check this out before tying an anvil to her leg and diving into the Ann Coulter abyss?

By “Ann Coulter abyss,” I mean the hole where smart pundits go when they go off the rails publicly.

Owens appears to think the Arab-Jewish conflict is a spat between two peoples, each of which has major legitimate grievances. She seems to think Israeli’s Jews are foreign oppressors who showed up one day and decided to throw Israel’s bona fide historical occupants out, and she doesn’t seem to have any idea how differently Jews and Arabs in the Middle East have treated each other.

Every adult in the US should read a recent article about the rapes that have occurred since October 7. Muslims have raped girls, women, and old ladies repeatedly in more than one orifice. They have broken pelvises. While one victim was being gang-raped, a Muslim sliced her breast off and took it around for others to play with. One Israeli was raped standing up, and while the Muslim was still inside her, he shot her through the skull.

You can go online and see at least one Jewish captive with huge blood stains on the back of her pants and between her legs.

Close your eyes and try as hard as you can to picture Jews doing this.

Yes, Jews have killed civilians. While trying as hard as possible not to. On the other hand, they haven’t deliberately set fire to living babies. I doubt you will be able to find any stories about Jews cutting babies out of women and beheading them while their umbilical cords still tied them to their mothers, but at least one Muslim did that during the terrorist raid.

Antisemitic Muslims are not like Jews. They have equalled the barbarism of the Nazis and the imperialist Japanese.

I keep calling them “Muslims,” not “Hamas,” because their religion is what caused all this. Islam is a religion of murder, torture, rape, slavery, theft, and pillage. It encourages its adherents to do the kinds of things we have seen them do this year.

If Hamas itself were the big problem, we wouldn’t have a slew of other Muslim terrorist groups, and Hamas would not win elections in Gaza by overwhelming margins.

Islam got its start as a protection racket. It’s a shame people don’t know this. Look it up. Mohammed’s new religion was going nowhere, but one day he decided to tell Muslims they were free to raid the towns of infidels and do pretty much what they just did in Israel. People converted not because God opened their eyes and confirmed Mohammed’s ravings, but because they were terrified of their terrorist neighbors, and also because they wanted to be able to do to others what Muslims had done to them.

On October 7, many Muslims celebrated their religion’s origins.

I have never hopped on the Candace Owens bandwagon. I’m relieved I can say that. I saw her saying things I thought were immature and obnoxious, and after that, I didn’t really care whether she was right on the issues. I saw her as a person I did’t want to endorse wholeheartedly. I liked some things she said, but that was as far as it went.

I don’t see politicians or self-anointed pundits as our saviors. It is often enjoyable to see them put leftists in their places, but conservatism per se is not what the world needs. It needs the unity that comes from the Holy Spirit. Conservatism isn’t the answer to our problems. Holy-Spirit-led Christianity is the answer to our problems, and conservatism is just an essential and natural by-product.

Here is one thing I like about watching Candace Owens out herself: it shows how blind intelligent people can be. Conservatives keep telling themselves that if they out-argue and out-meme the facially idiotic left, eventually enough people will come to their senses to bring us victory in the voting booth. It’s not true. If brains and logic mattered that much, nearly all Jews would believe Yeshua was the Messiah and God.

People are subject to supernatural blindness. Only the Holy Spirit can enable you to know the truth. If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit, you’re full of other spirits, and they deceive. They may give you part of the truth, plus some toxic adulterants, but overall, you will be blind.

Candace Owens doesn’t know the Holy Spirit, so in spite of her intelligence and general knowledge, she believes things so stupid a 5-year-old can debunk them in two minutes.

We are swimming in a sea of demonic deception, and only a tiny number of us are hearing the truth from the Holy Spirit.

Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz are done with Candace Owens. They think she’s ridiculous. She is, but so are they. They can’t figure out who their Messiah is. Who is more blind?

Maybe she got her ideas from other black people. No one is willing to talk about the huge problem of black antisemitism. Who knows what Owens heard from her parents and grandparents when she was young? She used to be a leftist. Maybe she hasn’t rejected all the mythology and libel.

The deception is going to get worse, and it will be everywhere. People need to understand this. You can argue and meme all you want. You might as well try to describe sunshine to a rock.

“Your Package has Been Shipped”

My wife is somewhere over Africa, telling stewardesses they’re too slow with her champagne. I expect to be having burgers and fries with her some time tomorrow.

Things are going quite well here. One of my best friends was raised by his grandmother, and she just passed away, so he and his kids had to spend the night here on the way to her funeral. His kids seem to be from another planet. They’re polite. They don’t break things. I have to keep telling them to talk LOUDER. Also, they cleaned my house.

I don’t know why they do this, but it happens every time they show up. I would be happy even if they came alone and left Dad at home.

I was dreading cleaning up the man-filth in preparation for trying to fool my wife about how neat I am before she takes over. Now I don’t have to do it.

We had a fantastic day yesterday. We hit Sonny’s BBQ and filled up on ribs. Every restaurant has off days, normal days, and on days. Sonny’s had an on day. The ribs were perfect. For dinner, I made two Sicilian pizzas. One cheese and one pepperoni.

I spent a lot of time talking to my friend’s only son. He has a tough life. Three sisters still in the house.

He started telling me how he loved my computer. I know little about it. I decided I wanted to make Youtube videos, so I found a guy online, telling people which parts to buy to build a suitable PC for a reasonable price. I bought the parts and built the PC. That’s all I know.

Evidently, it’s a gaming PC. I did not know this. Gaming and editing video require similar capabilities.

He knew all about the motherboard and graphics card.

It turned out he had a lot of tech interests. I told him about Arduino and Adafruit. I told him about soldering stations and so on. Maybe the next time I’ll see him, he’ll bring a homemade communications satellite.

Very smart kid.

He’s also conservative, which is not something you see a lot in junior high kids. We talked politics, and I told him stuff I had learned about God.

These kids are so quiet, I never know what’s happening in their lives, so it was a real revelation, conversing with him.

Things are going well for me, but America is not merely circling the drain; it already has one leg in it. This week, many Americans are on the web claiming Osama bin Laden, the mass-murdering idiot behind the deaths of over 3,000 innocent occupants of the World Trade Center (including Muslims), was right.

I’ll post more about that later.

I should hear from the little woman after 5 p.m today, and the next window of opportunity will come tomorrow morning. After that, Orlando in the afternoon.

I am not ready to shift into real married life. I have spent about two months with my wife, but we were always on vacation in exotic places. I have become very good at phone marriage and sending money. Having someone here all the time will be different.

The phone, immigration matters, and trip arrangements have been our chief activities for a long time. When she’s here, we can forget all that. So what will we do?

Fixing up the house and my wife’s wardrobe will kill a little time. After that, we will have to deal with freedom.

It’s a good problem to have. Some people have to get up every day and spend 10 hours trying to sell Bud Light.

I’ll continue the post during the next flight so I can express my thoughts about the bin Laden letter.

MORE

My wife had to make a connection in a country that gives Hamas billions, and even though I know that country has no idea who I am or where my wife is, I feel more at ease completing this post now that she is somewhere else.

Bin Laden wrote a ridiculous letter to America, and people are urging others to read it, claiming it proves he was actually a good guy and we were the problem.

Some highlights:

The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.

Right away, you can see that this letter is a scary, revealing litmus test. If you agree with bin Laden after reading the above citation, you are a Jew-hater. It’s possible for a person who does not hate Jews to believe Israel has done bad or unwise things from time to time, but if you want to erase the Jewish nation, which is legitimate, and abuse everyone involved in supporting it, you hate Jews.

[Y]ou have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah.

Well, we have the Torah, and it does promise all the land in “Palestine” (a non-historical nation) to the Jews. We have copies that predate the birth of the pedophile rapist Mohammed, who was born in the 500’s. Muslims don’t have a “real Torah” to show us. They do have the groundless ravings that form their own scripture. The same scriptures that mandate the killing of Jews and Christians, not just in Mohammed’s time, but forever.

Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad

Yeshua received worship and said he was the Messiah, so obviously, Muslims don’t “believe in” him. The Old Testament clearly says the Messiah is God, not just an anointed servant, so when Yeshua said he was the Messiah, he was claiming to be God. If you don’t believe this, you don’t “believe in” Yeshua.

When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them.

How did Jerusalem “return” to Islam when it had never been a Muslim city? The Muslims invaded Jerusalem in the same century in which the thief and murderer Mohammed made Islam up. Mohammed’s efforts to create Islam are said to have started in 610, and Jerusalem was invaded and taken over by Muslim imperialists and slavers in 638.

You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque

The Jews held Jerusalem for thousands of years, including times when they lived under occupation. Islam’s claim is based on a dream someone supposedly had about an unnamed mosque in an unnamed location. And Israelis are not planning to destroy the mosque. It will be wonderful when Yeshua finally destroys this den of idolatry, but the Israelis are content to leave it alone.

Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians.

Torture is actually a Muslim thing, just like chopping hands off without anaesthetic, which they do every week. Israelis don’t torture as policy, and soldiers who do it on their own are removed from their posts and sometimes imprisoned, but when Hamas attacked civilians in Israel this year, they printed a torture manual and sent it with their cowardly murderers. As for killing, that’s normal when people are making war on you and rejecting peace offers.

And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.

I think he means, “”whoever has killed our civilians reluctantly and unintentionally, while making a great effort to spare them, at a high cost in lives to their own military, often while we have used our civilians as human shields, then we have the right to kill theirs deliberately, in huge numbers, using means banned by all recognized standards of civilized warfare, and we also get to torture and rape them.”

The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question: Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?

Actually, those questions have been answered about a billion times. We attacked in New York because they tried to blow the World Trade Center up by detonating a huge bomb in the parking garage, hoping to murder as many innocent, defenseless civilians as possible, in conformity with their official policy.

Bin Laden said Al Qaeda was calling victim nations to Islam. Funny how dumb Americans, virtually all of them leftists, are excited about the religion which will execute them SOONER than conservatives.

We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.

Evidently, people of honor set fire to living babies, and they cut babies out of pregnant women and behead them, without even cutting umbilical cords. That’s Al Qaeda honor. In Gaza, they throw homosexuals off tall buildings, so “Queers for Palestine” must be a base-jumping club.

[T]he Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

I have no idea what Ben Franklin said. I know my life is not controlled by Jews. Even the Jew I worship permits me to do what I want.

Anyone who thinks there is a big Jewish conspiracy should round up a hundred Jews and try to get them to agree on ONE THING. It’s impossible. If there were a Jewish conspiracy, we would see some sign of it in, hello, the government of Israel, which is constantly plagued by disunity.

The Jewish conspiracy is certainly doing a great job of making the media side with Israel; every day, I see articles blaming Israel for the deaths of civilians Hamas uses as human shields. It’s like the entire press industry has turned into Al Jazeera.

If this is what a Jew-dominated press looks like, what would it look like if Jews backed off? “MATZOH PRICES DROP DUE TO INCREASED AVAILABILITY OF PALESTINIAN BLOOD.”

You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

So leftists support a guy who wants to ban drugs and alcohol. Try and imagine a world in which leftists could not get these things. The Betty Ford Clinic would have to set up FEMA tents. The entertainment industry would cease to exist.

You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

That’s a little weird, given the common Muslim practice of marrying first cousins. Bin Laden married his cousin. Incest hasn’t been spreading in America, but give it time. Post-gay-marriage-revolution, some here have noted that there is no biological reason to prevent gay marriages between relatives, and then there are incestuous couples in which at least one partner is sterile. Leftists will be the first to march for the changes, so how can any leftist support a Muslim extremist? They think Mike Johnson is dangerous because he believes the Bible.

You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly.

So leftists, who gave us the term “sex worker” to replace the accurate term “whore,” support a guy who is against making money from sex.

Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.

AIDS came from Africa, and when did leftists suddenly become okay with linking AIDS to sin? I mean, it’s correct, but leftists lose their minds when you dispute the idea that people who got this venereal disease aren’t heroes.

People who did their best to get AIDS got a quilt, but nobody got a trophy for syphilis. Where is the syphilis quilt?

You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.

Japan was ready to cause the greatest bloodbath the world had ever known, and it was already off to a great start with little projects like the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March. They taught women and kids to fight invaders with pointed sticks. They were ready to resist down to the last person. When the government decided to surrender, the military tried to stage a coup in order to keep the war going. It took TWO bombs to end the war because Japan kept fighting after one city was reduced to radioactive ruins.

We all know how easy it is to get ignorant leftists to believe fake history, though. They still think white people invented slavery, and they won’t admit most black slaves were bought from black traders. This information has been concealed from them in things called “books.” It’s no wonder they think the Japanese were the good guys.

The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only

We had a black president, we have numerous black billionaires, and Muslims still enslave blacks, but okay. Leftists don’t read, and they discard obvious facts, so no problem.

Regarding nuclear weapons:

Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.

Wow. Wonder why that is. We let you get your hands on two passenger planes, and look what you did. You shouldn’t be allowed to have matches. But leftists who stare at Tiktok all day and think Kim Kardashian should be president believe you.

Tiktokers are claiming we need to read this letter, and they say, “It’s only two pages long.” It’s more like 15 pages long. Who is paying them?

The sudden adoption of hell-resident bin Laden’s beliefs should disturb Americans who aren’t crazy. My fear is that antisemitism has suddenly become fashionable. I think it will be like gay marriage: almost universally opposed one day but coercively, overwhelmingly, oppressively supported the next. I don’t think Jews have years time left to prepare. I think months are all they can hope for, and months aren’t enough. Christians–real ones–will be targeted for genocide next.

The letter is exposing a lot of de facto Nazis of whom we would otherwise be aware.

This is a good time to bring the wife to the armed, fenced Northern Florida compound. I’ll give her a lasered pistol to carry. We’ll get her going with an AK-47 of her very own. I already told her it was hers. We’ll get her a carry permit so she can carry in other states. We’ll pray like crazy and dedicate ourselves to the one who keeps us safe. Maybe we’ll get some dry food. The tiny pawn shop where I pick up guns is selling bagged meals, three for 10 dollars.

I visited the other day, and I have mixed emotions about it. On the positive side, the place was busy handing guns over to people who had had them shipped in, so people here appear to be taking a productive attitude, and that’s reflective of the culture here.

I saw a nice old lady talking about gun classes and various aspects of gun ownership. She was very enthusiastic and seemed to know a lot. The kind of person you would expect to be preparing for Thanksgiving dinner with her grandchildren right now. A guy who worked in the store had a $10,000 M249S on the counter. An old guy from California came and picked up a piece, proving some people have the good sense to leave the state. I was only there about 35 minutes, and I guess 5 guns were picked up.

On the down side, they were selling those dried meals. A sign of well-founded pessimism. Guns can help you prevent disaster. When you’re eating freeze-dried food, disaster has already come.

Another shop I’ve used has a Ma Deuce in the showroom. Probably still ready to rock, full auto. They’re that kind of people. It’s an impressive weapon for a civilian to have. It will lay down a wall of lead, one round will tear a limb off, it’s unusually good for shooting through vehicles, and you can scope it and hit terrorists a very long way off. They splatter. Horrific.

It will be hard imposing sharia law in that shop.

God, not firearms, is my protection, but I don’t see any reason to invite problems through lack of ordinary preparedness. I mean, I own an umbrella. I don’t stand outside in the rain and pray the drops miss me.

The plane is on the way. Before the sun sets tomorrow, my wife and I will be at White Castle.

Mail-Order Bride Shipping Arrangements Made

Thanks, everyone who prayed for my wife to get her visa. They gave it to her this afternoon in Lusaka.

It’s an annoying story. They promised a response within 5 business days and then made us wait two weeks. It’s actually worse than that, because they didn’t do anything at all that we are aware of until she showed up yesterday at the embassy to find out what was going on.

I think they would have let our application go for weeks had she not visited the embassy. I believe we would still be waiting, and I also think she could have gotten the visa last week if she had gone earlier to shake them up.

She had a dream this morning. She was at her grandmother’s house, and a tall Arab dressed in white traditional clothes showed up and bombed the place. Somehow she knew he belonged to her church and attended regularly.

He had arrived on a private plane, and he left on one. He had authority behind him. He was rich.

It sounds bad, but her relatives on her dad’s side curse her and each other all the time. It’s a popular pastime in Zambia. When something good happens to someone in your family, you kill a chicken or whatever and curse them.

The immigration system is weird, as anyone who has seen luxury hotels full of illegals could tell you. I had to pay a new immigration fee today in order to get the green card processed. They should give you a green card when you get your visa, but they make you pay separately.

Looking for flights is annoying. We want her to go business class this one time in her life (until I croak). For $7000, I can get a somewhat better selection. For $5000 or less, I get a research project.

Orbitz offers a bunch of acceptable flights, but when you select one, it disappears or increases in price by a sizeable factor.

Skyscanner is supposedly one of the best flight sites now. We have also used Kayak a lot.

I found an acceptable flight, so we are all set.

Guess it’s time to shop for a turkey.

Rodent Ragnarok

Every so often, our government does something helpful. Today there are two pieces of good news.

First, it is now, once again, effectively, legal to put braces on pistols. Nationwide.

A brace can be pretty much the same thing as a buttstock. Some can be used to hold a pistol up to the shoulder to be fired like a rifle. There are also pistol braces that allow handicapped people to strap pistols to their arms so they can hold them more effectively.

The truth is that braces are popular because they allowed people to have short-barreled rifles without informing the feds. A brace can be used to turn an AR-15 or AK-47 into what is, all but legally, a rifle.

Joe Biden decided to forget about the Second Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act and order the ATF to come up with a rule banning pistol braces without expensive permits that take a year to get. To get a permit, you also give up your privacy. The feds keep a record so they can come get your guns later when the country devolves into utter chaos.

All sorts of legal tussling has taken place, and limited injunctions have been issued against the ATF. They helped some people, but not all. Yesterday, however, a Texas judge enjoined enforcement of the rule everywhere in the US.

What does this mean? It means the rule is gone for good. Probably. The injunction only applies while the case is being resolved, but the judge has made it clear he’s going to block the rule permanently. He has all but sworn it. After that, it goes to the 2A-friendly 5th Circuit. That will take a long time, and the 5th Circuit will very likely affirm. After that, the ATF will shoot for a Supreme Court review. They may not get it, and if they do, we have at least 5 justices who are usually pretty good about defending our civil rights. Some of our civil rights.

I suppose the ATF will file some kind of interlocutory appeal right away, but it probably won’t go anywhere, because the 5th Circuit will be the appellate court.

I’d say there is a 95% chance the rule will be dead for a couple of years. It should take that long for it to make it to the Supreme Court, which may or may not review the case. I’m afraid to guess how likely it is the Supreme Court will review the case or affirm. If they refuse to look at the case, it’s over. If they look at it, the odds of affirmation are definitely above 50%.

If the rule is dead for two years, it should be the end of it, because we are overwhelmingly likely to have a Republican president by then, and he will tell the ATF to let it go.

How important is this case? Probably not too important. To me, it means I can have a shouldered AK-47 6″ shorter in my vehicle. That’s great, but to be truthful, I doubt a 10″ barrel is much more likely to save lives than a 16″ barrel.

Still, the almost-certain end of the rule is a nice change. It means I can have the 10″ barrel, and I can also keep a short .22 rifle (oops–shouldered pistol) in my utility cart when I’m out and about on the farm.

And I won’t have to worry about going to prison over a gun part that has zero upward impact on crime rates.

Is it true to say using a brace is legal? I guess not, since the rule is still on the books. But if they can’t enforce it, who cares? In the unlikely event the rule survives, the ATF won’t be able to do anything to people who bought braces under the injunction. Before dusting off the jackboots, they’ll have to give everyone a chance to comply.

Now people have to ask themselves whether they should buy braces today or wait to see if there is an interlocutory appeal. You don’t want to spend $200 today and then have to discard the brace in two months.

Here is the second great thing the government is doing: they may drop the seasonal part of the squirrel hunting regulations on private land. Which is where I live.

Squirrels are horrible, and they are horrible all year round. They eat vehicle wiring. They eat patio furniture. They eat fruit and nuts. They give me dirty looks. I should be allowed to kill every squirrel I see, all the time, with anything short of an atom bomb. They are no better than rats. I should be allowed to kill a hundred a day and leave the bodies for the crows.

It is not unusual for me to look out the window and see 6 squirrels at once. This area is crawling with them. It’s infested with oaks, so it’s squirrel heaven. It’s too much. They need to go.

I haven’t been shooting them for a while. I’m a Christian. We’re supposed to be people of love. I don’t know if it’s good for me to sit in a tent and pop squirrels with a scoped rifle all day, given that I do it partly in anger. I really should start shooting them again, though. My truck won’t start, and I’m pretty sure they did it. I have a productive peach tree, and I’m lucky if they let me have three peaches a year.

I shoot them out of season, because the wildlife people told me it’s legal if they are menacing my property. This only applies near the house, though. I should be allowed to shoot them anywhere. I should be given a bounty every time I run over one.

I wish God would send a plague and make the hair on their tails fall out. Then they would look like rats, and people wouldn’t think they were cute. Animals that aren’t cute get a lot less legal protection.

They resist trapping. I’ve set various types of traps, and I’ve only trapped one squirrel. The best trap, supposedly, is a PVC pipe over a bucket of water. You provide bait, the squirrels slide down the pipe, and they drown. I don’t want to drown anything. I don’t want to sit in my living room wondering if a small animal is struggling for life in a bucket of water.

I’ve used Conibear traps. These are like little versions of the bear traps in old Warner Brothers cartoons. They crush squirrel’s heads or necks, depending on the breaks, putting an end to them fast. But squirrels avoid these traps.

I hope they make this rule change, and I also hope they grow spines and legalize bear hunting. I don’t care what anyone says; we don’t actually “need” 500-pound predators in our backyards. There is a reason why we killed them off in the first place. Every once in a while, a Florida bear kills and/or partially eats someone, and we are reminded how it feels to be prey.

We always hear the same thing. “If we kill off the grizzlies/black bears/wolves/lions/cockroaches/whatever, our ecosystem will suffer a devastating blow from which it will never recover.” What a load. The chestnut trees that used to cover the country died. Things are still fine. We got rid of wolves in most places, and it made life better. The passenger pigeon is gone, but the world keeps turning. Things would be fine if every black bear in Florida disappeared.

The same leftists that killed bear hunting also feed bears and God knows what else, teaching bears that people are food. Amazing.

I like bears, but we need fewer of them, and I will quickly dispatch any bear that bothers me whether or not I think the government will approve. Better to pay a lawyer than several teams of surgeons or a funeral home.

I’d kill Lassie if I thought she was going to bite me. I’m not going to lose the use of a hand so a dog can have a second chance. I was created in the image of God, and dogs were not. One of my hands is worth a whole lot of collies.

Me first. Those are the rules. I guess it’s only one rule. Anyway, me first. I’m more important than an animal. If Commander Biden had attacked me in the White House, they would have found him in a heap with a fractured skull. I don’t have a Secret Service career to worry about.

There are certain animals in my area that should always be killed on sight. Squirrels, rattlers, water moccasins, big alligators, squirrels, coons, bears, possums, armadillos, squirrels, bobcats, hogs, mice, coyotes, all dogs whose owners paint their toenails, and squirrels. That’s just reality.

I quit eating squirrels because they’re tiny and hard to clean, but I may resume once my wife is here. She’ll eat anything. She’s an African. She eats giant maggots called mopane worms.

Let’s segue into a criticism of the leftist media.

Right now, a bunch of people are fighting anthrax in Zambia. A story says 335 people got it. How? They ate hippo meat. Apparently hippos get anthrax.

What did NPR say about this? They claimed it was about African poverty, most of which is caused by me, personally, because I’m white and can tell I’m not a woman. My colonialism and transphobia are at the root of the problem.

NPR started out its stupid story with the claim that Zambians were so poor, they had to eat hippo meat. Instead of tofurkey meatloaf and Starbucks lemon cake like everyone else.

Poverty caused by white Steve causes anthrax epidemic among POC! Get the pitchforks and carbon-neutral torches!

The big problem with this claim is that hippo meat is expensive. It’s better than beef. Zambians love it. Stores can charge a lot. The people who got anthrax got it from a luxury product they could apparently afford. It infected affluent Zambians.

Doesn’t matter. It was my fault. Put me on the scale and find out if I weigh the same as a duck.

I don’t know if I’ll resume shooting squirrels or not, but I hope other people take it up. Hateful things. Worse than anthrax.

My Palate is Being Microaggressed

My wife is still not here. My latest beer, however, is in the keg and ready to party. I call it Wheat Privilege Ale. I keep it at 17 psi and 35 degrees, so it should contain around 3.22 volumes of CO2, meaning it’s pretty fizzy but not as fizzy as pop.

Guess I didn’t pay enough attention to making sure the phone’s camera was focused.

This is a cloudy wheat beer I came up with in around 2005. I started out with Amarillo hops, which provide a lemony flavor. This latest batch uses a new hop: Bergamot. It is named for the bergamot, a weird citrus fruit used to flavor Earl Grey tea and give scent to candles.

The names of many, if not all, hops are capitalized. I think some are even patented.

It is common for hops to taste and smell like citrus. A long time ago, the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company made a splash with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, an amber ale brewed with Cascade hops, which are said to provide grapefruit flavors and aromas. Cascade hops became very popular with professional and amateur brewers. Now there are other citrusy hops. Some examples: Mandarina Bavaria, Amarillo, Centennial, Lotus, and Citra. Bergamot must be pretty new because it’s hard to find information from people who have used it.

To me, Amarillo hops are lemony and Centennials lean toward orange. I decided to try Bergamot because some people said the orange or tangerine flavor was really heavy.

Wheat beer is great on its own, but it also takes additions well. Germans put raspberry syrup in finished weissbier. They also put some other syrup in it. Don’t know much about it. It’s green. Belgians put orange peel in their cloudy wheat beer during the brewing process. I figured it would be better to find a hop to give me oranges.

This beer seems to have a tangeriney scent and flavor, with a little hint of zest from the rind.

I really like it, but I just bought some Citra and Mandarina Bavaria hops for future experiments.

I wonder what would happen if I put a little tangerine juice in this beer.

Well, I just got up and tried it. Really nice. Ordinarily, I think it’s kind of effeminate to put stuff in beer, but wheat is its own little world.

It’s like a beer mimosa. I guess I put an ounce and a half of juice in 16 ounces of beer, and it’s superb.

Now I’m going to feel like I can’t drink this beer unless I have tangerines.

This one is going to go great with food. It will pair with anything. I could even drink this with pizza, and I hate beer with tomato sauce.

I received a water test report today. A company called Ward Labs sends people bottles and prepaid labels, and they email reports. I found out I have almost no sulphate or magnesium. Other than that, things are okay. It turns out my water is well-suited to stouts, which I could have guessed, because my stout is what they drink in heaven. It’s not perfect for light-colored lagers, but I can buy a couple of chemicals and fix it.

I would like to learn more about beer, but I’m only one person, and I can only go through so many kegs per year at my leisurely pace. I have 6 recipes I really like, and I only have space for 5 serving kegs. I want to keep at least 4 of my favorites on tap at all times, so that doesn’t leave much room for R&D.

First world problems. Everyone should have them.

Just Give her That Green Card

In case anyone is wondering, my wife is still in Africa.

She had her visa interview week before last, and they asked for more evidence that we were really married. We emailed it the same day, but it arrived after working hours because of the time difference. They told us they needed 5 working days. I thought this meant they would finish last week, but we now think they don’t count the day they first see the stuff in their email box. So we should be seeing a response tomorrow, by God’s grace.

The word says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.” We remember this in prayer. Consulate employees are not kings, but the principle applies.

My wife is nervous because she has been rejected so many times by other countries. It’s not the same thing, however. America is legally obligated to take her, and I have the right and the means to burden the system by pursuing legal remedies if the consulate blows it. They’re going to let her in. They want this application out of their pipeline. People in government jobs love getting problems off their desks.

It’s not like applying for a tourist visa to Italy, where they lie to you and verbally abuse you at the embassy and then go back on their word, knowing there is no accountability.

They wanted more proof I had been supporting her. Not hard to supply. They already had bank documents from her end. They wanted to see what I received from my bank, so I sent examples. Barring contributions from a new husband, it would be hard to explain how an unemployed woman went from living in poverty to owning a car and living in a nice rental house almost overnight, and the foreign trips would also be unlikely in the extreme without help, but they want to be sure.

They also wanted to check into the type of wedding we had. We were married online by the only county in the US that will marry a citizen to a foreign national who isn’t present in America. The embassy lady was not familiar with Zoom marriages, which is surprising, since they became very popular during the pandemic. It’s weird, but it’s 100% binding in every state.

The lady was very nice and seemed to have no doubts. I’m sure she can tell the difference between scammers and bona fide applicants, having seen many of both.

I am hoping I won’t have to buy a weekend ticket. The choices are limited, they cost more, and flights are crowded. We would really like to move her out by Thursday.

I think I’m fairly well prepared on this end. I bought 4 containers of Haagen-Dazs, and I have frozen ribs plus a beef rib roast. I have a set of large creme brulee dishes, too.

Thanksgiving will be upon us very quickly, so we will have to get ready. I’m thinking boneless turkey with cornbread stuffing and gravy, as always. Mashed potatoes with tons of garlic and butter. Cranberry relish. Yams blended with pineapple, butter, and brown sugar, with pecans on top glazed with more butter and brown sugar. One pecan pie. One pumpkin pie. Some other stuff.

The local Publix had BOGO Miracle Whip this week, so we are all set for turkey sandwiches.

I don’t know if I will be able to make her understand that you don’t eat creme brulee on Thanksgiving.

We are still planning to hit White Castle on the day she arrives.

I don’t know if her relatives fully understand their situation. They are less resourceful than she is, and she has helped them with a lot of their problems. She’s about to leave them behind, so she is having to tell them to get it together. I don’t know what will become of them. Because she will be here, her ability to help will be curtailed.

She may never see any of them again. Getting them tourist visas is impossible, and I’m not shelling out 5 figures to bring them over anyway. I have no desire at all to go to Zambia, and I don’t think my wife does, either. She’s not all that close to her siblings. Her mother and father died many years ago, the family has been shaken up, and there are age differences.

She put me on the phone with 4 of my new nephews the other day. I can’t remember their ages, but I think they’re all under 10. They asked all sorts of questions. They seemed to think they would be coming to visit. Even if it was realistic to expect us to fund a $20,000 excursion, which it isn’t, Uncle Sam would not let them come. I didn’t explain this to them. They are too young to understand. Sad.

It’s frustrating having very poor in-laws who aren’t very capable. My wife is not much like them. She gets stuff done.

She’ll have to get a Florida phone number, so a lot of relations and acquaintances who now have her number will not have it in a month. She is looking forward to the peace.

While I wait, I fiddle with trivial endeavors. Today I kegged a wheat beer, and I made it with a new hop: bergamot. Supposed to have a lot of orange flavor.

Very happy with the name I came up with.

I hope I have something good to write tomorrow night.

Sliders and Concealed Carry: the Best America Has to Offer

The problem with brewing is that so few conclusions have been nailed down, even though homebrewers seem to know a great deal. Things that should be obvious by now are still unknown to a lot of us.

Example: which tubing to use to hook gas and beer up.

When you have a keezer, which is a freezer modified with taps and one or more tanks so you can dispense beer from it, you have to have a tank, kegs, and taps. You need tubing to get the gas from the tank to the gas regulator, from the regulator to the kegs, and from the kegs to the taps.

In the old days we used plain old vinyl from Home Depot.

After I quit brewing in ’07, people started getting anxious about oxygen.

When you brew your beer and put it in a fermenter, you want it to have oxygen in it. It makes the yeast happy. When fermentation is over, you want the oxygen gone. It interacts with beer and eventually ruins the flavor.

There are a lot of ways oxygen gets into beer. I used to run a tube from a fermenter into a keg with the lid off. That was how I got beer into the keg. Of course, oxygen got in. Wasn’t really a problem, but it could have become one if I let the beer sit long enough. Now I take a sanitized keg full of CO2 and I pump beer into it from the fermenter. Everything is sealed and pressurized.

Everything should be fine, right? No, because I have been using vinyl to get gas from the tanks to the regulators. At least I did this with one tank. I have two tanks in my keezer. One is CO2, for normal beers, and the other is a nitrogen/CO2 mix, for stout. As of a few days ago, I still had vinyl on the CO2 primary regulator.

What is a primary regulator?

I have 4 kegs of beer on one tank of CO2. The CO2’s pressure is hundreds of psi. It has to be stepped down so it doesn’t blow the kegs up. There is a gas regulator on the CO2 tank to get this done.

Most guys are happy with that. They will have the same pressure in all their kegs. Not me. Ales like more gas than lagers, and heavy beers may want a whole lot of gas. I bought a secondary regulator. This is 4 regulators in parallel. Each one can be adjusted to provide a pressure I like. Right now, three are at 12 psi, and one is at 18 psi, for my brutal fake Belgian ale.

Primary regulator on the tank. Secondary regulator between the primary and the kegs.

I had a fat vinyl tube going from the primary to the secondary.

It turns out vinyl lets oxygen in. The CO2 in the vinyl is at a minimum of 18 psi in order to get 18 psi in the fake Belgian, and atmospheric air is at 0 psi (gauge pressure), so how can oxygen get in? Doesn’t the CO2 keep it out? Apparently not. It’s sort of like osmosis. The tube sees 0 psi of oxygen inside itself, but our atmosphere is about 20% oxygen, so it sees oxygen pressure outside. The vinyl is not perfectly impermeable to oxygen, so some goes in.

This is the story, anyway.

An Australian company named Kegland makes all sorts of innovative products for brewers, and they created (or maybe found) EVAbarrier, a stiff tubing that is pretty good at keeping oxygen out. They also sell Duotight fittings to connect the tubing to beer and gas.

It’s really convenient. You don’t have to use hose clamps. You cut your tubing to the right length and shove it into the fittings. They bite down on it and seal it up.

As of night before last, my CO2 system has been connected with EVAbarrier. I was already using it for everything but the primary-secondary leg, so I only had to replace two fittings and one tube.

I resumed brewing at the end of December. I made some errors. Wrong mashing schedules. I accidentally shot lubricating oil into a batch of beer because I used a pellet gun CO2 cartridge instead of one made for beverages. Little things went wrong, but I still have one beer from early this year which is very good. As I get caught up with new technology, things get better.

I have one recipe I’m not planning to brew again. It’s just not great. Other than that, I can’t find factory beer I like as much as my own. If I had to go back to factory beer, I’d go back to my old drinking habits, meaning around a 12-pack per year.

I’m having a stout right now. It’s hard to imagine how this beer could be better.

I was thinking I should brew a wheat ale tomorrow. I have a couple of batches of grain, including a wheat recipe, and I don’t have any wheat beer except for the really heavy one I made last week. Today I realized that if I brew beer tomorrow, my wife may well be here before it’s ready to drink.

Her embassy appointment is finally upon us. She could be here 10 days from now, depending on the breaks and whether she is serious about getting her hair done before she comes.

It’s very weird, being this close. I go to the store and buy things, and I find myself thinking she may be here to eat them.

We spend a tremendous amount of time on the phone together. That’s all about to end. What will we do with our time when we suddenly find ourselves with days that aren’t broken up by calls? We’ll save at least three hours per day, and we will have nearly nothing to do.

I have to face the reality of not living like a single man. I have to get a kitchen table that doesn’t fold up. I need two real dressers instead of the awful, enormous dresser my mother got at an outlet store in the Carolinas in the Seventies. I’ll have to move my $80 Chinese Amazon headboard to a bed in a guest room.

I have talked about buying her a business class ticket. I’m looking into it. She will probably have a flight running around 35 hours. Airlines don’t have much interest in Zambia, so she will have to have a minimum of two stops.

Personally, I am an economy guy. I believe I’ve flown first class twice. I recall my dad upgrading the two of us with his endless points. That happened once. I also recall sitting in a first class seat next to a drunk who was some kind of prisoner. He cried a lot. As I recall, he was a black man in a red suit.

I was probably in college. I don’t recall how I got into first class, and I have no idea why they chose me to sit next to a prisoner. I seem to recall him being handcuffed to an armrest. That can’t be right, can it? Maybe that’s how they did things back then.

I don’t recall having a cop anywhere near us.

If I’m going to spend thousands of dollars, I want something I can touch. A piece of jewelry. A new welding table. I don’t want to spend $200 an hour for a ticket upgrade so my butt can be slightly less sore the next day.

Let’s face it. While an upgrade may be nice for a short flight, there is no such thing as a nice long flight. Moving you to business class doesn’t help. I don’t care if they give you a stateroom with a bed. It’s still going to be a miserable experience. I’d rather have the money than the 10% decrease in suffering.

I brought up business class, however, and my wife liked the idea, so now I’m on the hook. I hope she enjoys it and takes pictures, because I don’t plan on buying any more business class tickets unless Elon Musk sees my blog and decides to send me one of his spare billions.

Finding my wife a business class ticket that costs less than a major operation is a challenge, mostly because everyone hates Africans. Flights that are low on the cost scale almost always involve self-transfers. That means she will have to get off the plane at least once, get her bags, go through customs and immigration, go through security again, and board. It’s not a big problem if you’re American, but if you’re African, many countries will force you to get a visa in order to walk across their airports and change planes.

It’s idiotic. Even if her brand-new green card will motivate a country to issue a visa, it will take forever to get the visa, so it’s not practical. I would have to pay her rent in Zambia the whole time, and then she might get turned down.

West Africans are the problem. Especially Nigerians. They go to other countries, refuse to leave, and start criminal enterprises.

I can’t route her through England. Forget that. Our best bet looks like Turkey. She might have to stop in Dubai on the way. She might have to land in two different African countries.

So what will we do when she gets here?

High on the list: White Castle. The family that owns the company sadistically refuses to expand in any meaningful way, but they opened a restaurant in Orlando. The biggest White Castle on Earth. We’ll be doing that.

Sonny’s. This is a Florida barbecue chain. Pretty good, even though Bidenflation now has them putting “Market Price” beside ribs on the menu.

She loves Italian food. There’s a really good place near me. Run by Mexicans. Go figure. It’s clean. The prices are reasonable. The food is great. The staff is polite.

I’ll have to get her a driver’s license ASAP, not to mention a carry permit. Permits are not required in Florida, but if she has one, she will be allowed to carry in other states. I already have a 9mm for her with a Crimson Trace.

After all this, the dentist. And we have to get medical insurance and a new phone plan for two.

We are not doing too bad for clothing and so on. We traveled to countries with good stores.

We need to get the pickup in shape so we will have two vehicles.

That’s all I can think of. I wanted to take her to Israel, but our timing has worked out poorly. There are no good winter destinations in the US.

Okay, maybe there are, but we have no interest in skiing or beaches, and we’re not going to places that look better with leaves on the trees.

I hope to have her out in the pasture shooting steel very soon. I can taste those sliders already.

Telling the Truth Gives Them Chest Pains

I can’t find my favorite chili garlic sauce. Like we need another shortage. And the people who claim global warming is the problem are apparently lying.

It’s very disheartening to see people blame everything on man-caused global warming, which probably doesn’t exist. Drought? Global warming. Floods? Global warming. Heat? Cold? No change? All caused by global warming.

There are people out there claiming sexual perverts are disporportionately harmed by global warming. Explain that.

The shortage began with Huy Fong sriracha sauce, which is a below-par sauce made in California. It’s the one with the chicken on the bottle. At some point, hipsters decided they had to put sriracha on everything, including things that taste bad with sriracha on them, and, being the mindless herd creatures they are, they decided Huy Fong was the only brand worth buying. This seems to have established a large consumer base.

A year or two back, Huy Fong’s production dropped. Hipsters lost it. They scrambled to corner the sriracha market. For a while, Huy Fong’s unimpressive sriracha commanded astounding prices. Now you can buy it on Amazon for the low, low price of $14 per bottle, which is still grotesquely inflated.

I didn’t care. I like sriracha on a few things, but Huy Fong’s product isn’t that great. It leans toward ketchup. I have an ancient, nearly-full bottle in my fridge.

You want good sriracha? Try Shark brand. It’s amazing. You can get it at a site called Import Foods. I have two bottles. The medium and the hot are virtually identical, so buy the cheaper one.

Shark is a real Thai product, made in Thailand. By Thais. The California guy who runs Huy Fong is Vietnamese. “Huy Fong” sounds Chinese to me, but let’s not go there.

The eco-nuts want us to think a drought in Mexico caused the Huy Fong shortage, but even the MSM says otherwise. It turns out Huy Fong committed fraud and nearly destroyed Underwood Farms, the CALIFORNIA (not Mexico) operation that supplied most of the peppers. Underwood Farms sued and won $14 million, and the verdict has been affirmed on appeal. The original verdict came down in 2019, so the problems existed before that.

Underwood Farms now sells its own line of sauces, and Huy Fong is hopping mad but can’t do anything about it.

I would have called the Underwood Farms brand “Su Yu,” but no one asked.

I don’t eat Huy Fong sriracha, so why do I care? Because now they aren’t shipping their chili garlic sauce, a different product which is excellent. It suddenly disappeared from stores. My guess is that they redirected a lot of peppers to the sriracha operation, because sriracha is now liquid gold.

I used to dump chili garlic sauce on my hummus when I ate breakfast. I did that until two days ago. Then I went to the store and saw no Huy Fong products at all. I Googled and saw Reddit posts in which people asked what else they could use. It looks like chili garlic sauce vanished quite a while ago in most places, but I didn’t know because I bought it in big bottles which take a long time to empty.

Now, breakfast is a sad and gloomy affair, during which I pretend Frank’s Red Hot is an adequate substitute for chili garlic sauce.

I managed to locate the sauce on the web at a reasonable price, in a very strange place. I haven’t bought it yet because I am looking at alternatives.

I read that you can make your own sauce from red jalapenos or Serranos, sugar, garlic, salt, and vinegar. These peppers are not hard to find because, hello, there is no pepper shortage. Peppers are everywhere, as are sauces that have no connection to Huy Fong.

I may make my own sauce before springing for the real thing. The site I found advertises two jars for an okay price, but it doesn’t say how big the jars are. That makes me want to wait.

I also learned that there are other Asian pepper sauces I should be looking at, so I may order a few. One is called sambal, and there are different kinds of it. At least one type is flavored with shrimp paste, which sounds pretty good. I found three varieties of sambal, and I may order all of them. Import Foods recommends sambal oelek to replace chili garlic sauce.

Asians make the best pepper sauces. Mexicans aren’t even in the running. I’ve tried all sorts of Mexican sauces. Some are pretty good, but nothing compares to Huy Fong chili garlic sauce or Shark sriracha. Yesterday, I bought a goopy sauce made by Thai Kitchen, and it’s fantastic. It’s not good with hummus, because it’s sweet, but it’s a wonderful discovery. It’s used on egg rolls. I may as well start looking around to see what else I’m missing.

Americans make a lot of bad hot sauces. I think Tabasco may be the most overrated sauce, after Huy Fong sriracha. It’s harsh and flavorless. Frank’s and Crystal are better, and you can get a quart of Crystal for 4 dollars.

It’s kind of strange that Mexicans make mediocre hot sauces compared to nearly everyone in the Far East. After all, the New World has had peppers forever, but the rest of the world didn’t get a chance until around 1500.

So in a nutshell, leftists lie again, Shark is better than Huy Fong, and it may be a couple of weeks before I can make breakfast great again.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

My latest beer, an orange lager, is nearly ready to keg, and I only started on Monday.

Brewing is like cooking, because it’s really a kind of cooking. It’s a culinary art. Beverages are part of every cuisine. I stand by that. Like all types of food and beverage preparation, brewing is full of myths and old wive’s tales. You know what I mean. “Steaks have to be rested.” “Dough has to be kneaded for 10 minutes.”

Traditional lager brewing takes a long time. Lagers are fermented at lower temperatures than ales, slowing the yeast down. Then they are “lagered,” which means they sit and age for weeks to kill the off flavors. How much of this stuff is really necessary? Not all of it.

There is a site called Brulosophy. The proprietor tests beer myths. For example, he may make two batches of the same beer, boiling one for 30 minutes and the other at 60. He then makes people taste the results and tell him whether they can tell a difference. He applies statistics to determine whether there really is a perceptible difference. He has brewed beers at different temperatures with excellent results. He has tested to see if lagering is needed. He has done all kinds of things to annoy traditionalists. There must be a bounty on him in Germany.

Also, homebrewing has changed over the last few years. For one thing, many people, myself included, now ferment some beers under pressure. The pressure suppresses off flavors that ordinarily arise when you ferment at higher temperatures. If you crank up the pressure, you can ferment faster and get the same results. Yeast likes heat.

I started pressure-fermenting as soon as I heard about it. I made the mistake of buying a plastic pressure fermenter called an All-Rounder. It’s made by Kegland, an Australian company. Actually, I think they’re Chinese, because they have a shop on Aliexpress, the guy who does their videos looks Chinese, and they have at least one product they can’t sell in the US because of patent problems.

The All-Rounder is just a huge plastic jug with a round bottom. The screw-on lid has fittings on it for disconnects, which are devices that let gas and liquid go in and out.

I got a decent lager out of my All-Rounder on the first try. I fermented at 75°, which was convenient. No fridge needed. It had a taste that reminded me of freshly-mown grass, but it wore off after a month.

I decided I did not like the All-Rounder. The jug is flimsy. It weakens with repeated use. You’re supposed to pressure-test it and eventually get rid of it. I don’t want a fermenter blowing up in my garage, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the same product, over and over. It’s like buying an inkjet printer for $50 and spending $5000 on ink.

I now use Torpedo Megamouth 6-gallon stainless kegs. These do not blow up if the pressure gets too high. Like ordinary homebrew kegs, they have pressure relief valves, and these valves release long before the pressure can hurt stainless steel. Plastic, not so much. Not if it’s old and weak.

I make 5 gallons of beer at a whack, so a 6-gallon keg will hold all the beer plus whatever foam grows on top. I add a product called Fermcap to prevent the foam from getting too thick.

I wondered if fermenting at 75° caused my off flavor. I also suspected oxygen, because I believe there was a point where I had to let a tiny bit of air into the All-Rounder. I decided to ferment this latest batch at 60° instead.

There are always a few little problems on brew day, but I got this thing into the fridge in the evening on Monday.

Of course, I always have to make a mistake, and this time, I failed to set the keg O-ring properly. As of yesterday, I thought the beer was doing nothing, because the pressure wasn’t building. I have a gauge on the fermenter, and it was stuck at zero.

Instead of doing the obvious thing and checking the seal with soapy water, I fiddled around for several hours. Finally, I got out the spray bottle, and I found the issue. I fixed it up and pumped 15 psi into the keg. While I was doing all this, I had to crack the keg lid open, and I saw all sorts of krausen, which means foaming yeast. The fermentation was flying.

Today when I checked, the pressure was way over 15. It was past the numbers. Maybe 25, if I had to guess. I adjusted it and tested the beer’s specific gravity, which drops as beer ferments. I got 1.013. That was a lot lower than what I expected. Things are going quickly.

I had some unusual problems measuring the gravity on Monday. Not sure what was happening. I was using a cheap refractometer which generally works fine. I have a theory that, because I was mixing boiled water into the wort to change the gravity, I got some samples which had more water in them than others. Or maybe stirring the crud on the bottom of the kettle up while mixing the water in increased the gravity for some readings. Anyway, my best guess is that the OG (original gravity) was 1.053, or 0.001 above the target. A bullseye, really, because refractometers and hydrometers aren’t as accurate as brewers like to think. This beer’s gravity plunged 40 points in under 60 hours.

My target FG (final gravity) is 1.012, so 1.013 means the beer is either finished or nearly so. If it was actually lighter than 1.053 to start, it’s done. If it was heavier, it may have some time to go.

It tastes fine, except for the harsh yeast bite every new beer has before the yeast drops out. Yeast is bitter. I’m not getting any grass flavor.

It looks like I can ferment a great lager in 4 days at 60°, which tells me there is no reason to go to 75°. I remember when people were keeping lagers in their fermenters for much longer. Four days will be fine.

Now I have to decide when to clarify and keg the beer.

Conventional wisdom says beer doesn’t ferment after kegging, but I know this is wrong. It may be true for factory beers, some of which are pasteurized, but I know at least one of my beers (stout) gets dryer after kegging, and that means yeast is at work.

I would like to have yeast on the job after kegging, to continue to improve the beer.

What about clarifying? I will be adding gelatin to the beer, and this makes all the floating stuff fall out, presumably including yeast. If I clarify before kegging, will that be too much for the yeast to handle?

Stout isn’t clarified, so I can’t really judge by what it does.

When I got started in brewing, they told me not to touch a lager for weeks after I kegged it. Should I listen to that advice now? I don’t think so. Many people question it, and not just people who don’t know good beer.

I think this beer will be very good as soon as I keg it, and it will be perfect a month later. The plan is to keg it and then put it in the keezer at 35°. I’m a slow drinker, so I will probably take 6 months to empty it. I think it will age perfectly well during that time, and I think the beer will stop improving after a month.

Brewers who do lagers often do “diacetyl rests.” This means heating your still-unkegged beer a few degrees and letting it sit until the diacetyl goes away.

Diacetyl is the chemical they put on fake buttered popcorn. Sometimes beer generates it during fermentation. I don’t plan to do a diacetyl rest. My understanding is that warm fermentations don’t produce diacetyl. This is one of the reasons people use pressure. I have also read that commercial brewers use pressure for this reason.

I think I’ll just shoot gelatin into this beer tomorrow and keg it using a closed, oxygen-free system. I should be drinking it on Saturday.

Tomorrow I’m making stout. I haven’t finished my last keg, but the thought of being without stout is terrifying. After that, I might go nuts and make a wheat-heavy Belgiany beer I made in the past. It’s very strong and full of flavor, and you can literally age it for years without ruining it.

By the middle of next week, I should have a keg of orange lager and a fresh keg of stout ready to drink. After that, I’ll feel safe enough to play with other things. I don’t want to run out of staples. They come first.

I wanted to call my orange lager Mar-a-Lager, for obvious reasons, but someone took the name a long time ago. Same for MAGA Lager. “Bigly” is taken. “Covfefe.” I call it Great Again Lager. Best I could do.

Because the beer I’m making now is already under pressure, carbonating it should be either easy or unnecessary. Another benefit. Carbonating a flat new beer is tricky, and you can end up with a long period of foamy beer.

It’s nice, having kind of a system worked out. I don’t wonder what equipment I need or what changes I have to make. The basic plan is in place. Everything else is small strokes.

So Much for European Enlightenment

Got some pretty interesting news this week.

First of all, my wife’s final embassy interview was postponed 10 days. No explanation given. We got the news earlier this week. Today, the embassy’s Facebook page (which, incredibly, exists) said 10 embassy employees had been fired for corruption.

Postponement explained.

My hope, of course, is that they fired people who were likely to DELAY issuance of visas. I hope they kept the ones who rubber-stamp everything.

The second bit of news is that the Europeans have denied her a visa again.

We were trying the Czech Republic. They respond to requests pretty quickly, and they seemed to have a relatively positive attitude toward Africans. For example, the Czechs have a scholarship program that brings Zambians to Czechia to study. We told them we would go to Prague and then Rome.

We weren’t all that excited about visiting Eastern Europe in November, but we knew a Schengen visa would get us into Italy as well as Czechia, so we were willing to take the bad with the good. Actually, I was hoping to change our travel plans after we arrived and cut our Czech time to three days. Once you’re in Europe, they can’t do anything to make you go where you said you would. Nobody needs to spend a whole week in the Czech Republic.

Today we found out we were rejected. They had a ton of documentation proving my wife was not going to stay there illegally and clean toilets for a living, but they didn’t care. We showed them she was about to be cleared to move to the US. We proved assets way beyond what was needed to pay for the trip. We showed them we had already paid for accommodations and tours. We gave them our original marriage certificate, which, bizarrely, they required. Didn’t matter.

So what’s the explanation? Prejudice is the only plausible answer. They just don’t want Africans. They don’t trust them. Maybe they let a few students in, to take study positions where they can be closely monitored, but forget visiting as a tourist. They don’t care how obvious it is that you won’t be a problem. They don’t want to look at the facts.

They put her application in a pile or threw it out, and they waited for her to come back for an answer. Then, without looking her documents over, they told her to take a hike.

The good news is that I’m glad, because this means she will be her sooner, and we will avoid spending a huge amount of money on a trip to a third-rate destination in bad weather. They did me a big favor. Now I don’t have to go to Prague.

I’m sure Czechia is nice, and Prague may be the most beautiful large city on Earth, but it’s a historical and cultural backwater compared to places like Paris and Rome, and these days, it is jam-packed with tourists, even in winter. Tourists are thicker than TBN preachers in hell.

Also, the food looks unbelievably bad. There is a reason we never see Czech restaurants in malls. Remember the dinner scene in Top Secret?

The farther north and east you go in Europe, the more off-putting and strange the food gets. Spain, Italy, France, Greece…excellent. Germany…passable. Scandinavia, England, and Russia…like prison food.

Based on Youtube videos I’ve watched, it appears Russians are swarming Prague. I don’t know how well they mix with tourists from NATO countries. I am not all that eager to mingle with Russian tourists. I suspect they are like British tourists. Drunken, loud, and likely to vomit at any second. Dublin sidewalks are always decorated in British vomit.

Russians sound like the kind of people I would have wanted to hang around with in college.

Americans used to be the problem tourists on this planet. As other countries have accumulated wealth and started to travel more, that distinction seems to have become harder to award. The mainland Chinese do unspeakably rude things, for example. Communism makes people coarse. The Taiwanese are probably great guests.

To get back to Prague, it looks a lot like Disney World. Throngs of tourists everywhere, even in the slow season. Tons of businesses designed for tourists. Lots of scams.

If it’s bad in cold weather, imagine the summer.

Rome sounds better, but my research suggests it’s not what it once was. It’s hard to book activities in November. The crowds are legendary. Also, tourism forums warn about the omnipresent pickpockets, who have formed a de facto industry.

I wasn’t excited about this trip. Wrong season. Lackluster primary destination.

Now that Europe has once again shown us its true, hypocritical nature, my wife should be able to arrive here a week earlier, which is fantastic. We lose 10 days because Zambia is crazy, but we gain days we would have spent traveling. There is absolutely no reason to expect anything but a quick visa issuance. America isn’t Europe. We actually let people in. Boy, do we let people in.

We feel cheated because we didn’t get a second trip this year, but hey, America is huge, and my wife hasn’t seen it. Maybe we can see the Smokies before the leaves fall off. Meanwhile, we can apply for a visa to visit Israel, which is a better destination than any European country.

European visas are not that hard to get once you have a green card. I think the Europeans don’t want to make Uncle Sam mad, and besides, they realize nearly no one wants to leave the US and move to Europe. Half of them are trying to move here.

American winter destinations are generally pretty bad. There are the beaches, which neither of us wants to see. The beautiful non-beach areas will be cold, there will be no leaves on the trees, and many locations will be rainy and muddy. Most of our big tourism cities have turned into mental asylums. Neither of us ski or plan to learn, so forget the western mountains.

Maybe we’ll never see Prague. That’s okay with me. I’ve never wanted to visit. It makes me think of Franz Kafka. Prague will never see my dollars, so it’s a two-edged sword.

When I got the news about the visa, I went online and canceled a whole lot of engagements. Around $3000 for hotels and an Airbnb. Another grand or so for activities. Thank God I didn’t buy airline tickets. There may be some long faces in Czechia and Italy today. Nothing I can do.

I feel God has blessed us once again.

Your Colon Will Thank You

My standard breakfast is vegetable stew with some kind of meat in it, but making it is a big chore with a lot of cleanup afterward, so lately I’ve been having my other standard breakfast: the kibbutz breakfast.

I learned about this in Israel, while picking grapefruit every day. Kibbutzniks are supposed to be atheists, because their movement began in Marxism, but they have two meatless meals every day anyway, perhaps to avoid offending old people who like to fool themselves and pretend they’re keeping kosher. I’m assuming they still eat what they did when I lived there.

They provided boiled eggs, various raw vegetables, plain yogurt, hummus, really bad white toast, and something called porridge, which seemed to be Cream of Wheat. I think they also served cottage cheese, but I don’t recall for sure. I believe they served margarine, which is disgusting and probably unhealthy. They also had terrible jelly. They may have had raw oats, too. Back when I was there, kibbutzniks were not known for good taste in food.

When I picked the right things from the menu, I ended up with breakfasts that were healthy and reasonably tasty. Now that I’m in America, and I’m not dependent on kibbutz kitchen workers who make bad choices and can’t cook, I can do a better job than they did. I use pita instead of toast. I get or make better hummus, with lots of hot pepper sauce. I use full-fat cottage cheese, and I eat sour cream instead of yogurt.

As for vegetables, I like carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and hot pickled peppers.

It would be nice to have tahini, but making and using it are a lot of aggravation.

It works pretty well, and you can probably guess that constipation is not a problem for me. And I knock off my day’s fruit and vegetable requirement in one meal.

The big obstacle is the pita. It comes in tiny bags here, and it gets moldy fast, so I have to keep going to the store if I want to have pita on hand. The solution? Homemade pita.

I saw a bunch of recipes online, but they looked stupid to me. “Knead by hand for 10 minutes.” “Stir the yeast into warm water and wait until it foams up.” “Mix in half the flour and wait until it looks fluffy to add the rest.” Come on. Wives’ tales and mythology. I wasn’t going to mess with all that unnecessary labor. The fact that bakers did something stupid 500 years ago doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it today.

I got out one of my pizza dough recipes, and it worked great. In case you want to try it, I’ll provide it.

INGREDIENTS

180 grams flour
120 grams water
0.8 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. oil, your choice

I used high-gluten flour, but I think flour with less gluten would be better, because eventually you get tired of chewing.

Blend the dry ingredients in a food processor with a chopping blade. If you make a lot of dough, use a dough blade. Add the water while continuing to process. As soon as the flour is wet, stop. A lot of flour will be stuck to the sides of the bowl. Use a silicone spatula to push it back down. Continue blending until you have something resembling dough. Wait 5 minutes. Add the oil and blend again for maybe 30 seconds. Done.

Remove it and stretch it in your hands a few times, turning it inside out and pressing it back together. Do this to put tension in the dough. Make a ball or disk and put it on a sheet of nonstick foil sprayed with a little oil. Cover with a glass bowl. Let it rise fully.

Preheat your oven to 500°, using a stone or pizza steel. Cut the ball in 4 pieces. Shape each piece into a new ball. Roll them out as thin as you can, like 1/16″. Let them sit for 20 minutes.

Throw each piece on the hot stone or steel. It will blow up magically by itself, creating an inner pocket. You know those bubbles that form in pizza crust? They’re the same thing as pita pockets.

Turn your dough after maybe 90 seconds and bake it until it looks right.

That’s it. Very, very easy. It will taste better than store pita, and you can make it every couple of days in order to avoid shopping trips. You can scale it up if you need bigger batches.

I use a lot of flour when rolling out dough, and instead of a rolling pin, I use a length of 2″ PVC pipe. Rolling pins are stupid. The only problem with the pipe is that I can’t put it in the dishwasher, but that doesn’t work well with rolling pins, either.

I suppose you could fry this stuff and end up with something like poori, but I don’t really know. I think you would have to replace some of the water with yogurt. The main blessing here is the method, not the ingredients. It should work with other kinds of bread.